Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 12 June 1919, Page 14

Current Topics

Irish News .. r ; fe .UmV'• ./.,;,.The, fablegrams are striving to.sustain their- reputation for idiocy. Some, .time ago we were told that Lloyd Georgeor, as . those who respect, him least contemptuously call him, Mr. George—was trying to - arrange a meeting . with the American ~ delegates • r to the Peace Conference. / The delegates . did. not \ come ,to, see Mr. George, nor had the}’- any reason to seek his company. As a result of . that, we very soon had the fablegram issued that Mr. George would : not see : the delegates at all, at all. And a few days later, when the Americans had witnessed- for themselves how England, the champion of small nations, is oppressing the Irish people, ,we were told that Mr. Lansing had something to say about not receiving delegates who could not look on scenes of horror and on exhibitions of PrUssianism. without betraying their feelings as humane, honest men on the matter. Now, whether or no Mr. Lansing did or did not say this is of no importance. What does matter is that the delegates have actually witnessed and felt what British rule in Ireland means. How can that matter They have told us themselves. Mr. Dunne declared that they have behind them in their mission no less than one hundred million people. Mr. Walsh stated that if the Peace Conference persists in refusing to hear the delegation of the Irish Republic the mission will demand a hearing as American citizens speaking for the Irish nation. And if that request be denied, continues Mr. Walsh, the mission will go back to America to inform the American people that the pledges made to them have been broken. When- we recall that Irish independence is demanded by Congress and by many State Parliaments, as well as by numerous mass meetings held all over the United States, it is not hard to conceive that the news that England has not only betrayed the Irish soldiers who fought for her, but that she has also betrayed the Americans who came into the war to secure the right of self-determina-tion for small nations, will arouse a storm that is likely to wreck President Wilson and. to cause intense hostility between England and the people who saved John Bull from the tender mercies of his Prussian cousins. If one could judge by ordinary rules of common sense there could be no doubt that Ireland’s case must be heard at the Peace Conference, and that England should be most eager to bring it forward. But in dealing with John Bull one has to remember that he is led by the nose by a combination of No-Popery maniacs and profiteers who would cheerfully kill every Irish Catholic rather than keep their own pledges or respect the sacredness of a scrap of paper. Sinn Fein will never again submit to Castle rule in Ireland. It will never trust the word of a trickster like Lloyd George. And every blunder that the Government makes is making its case stronger. The irritation of a Queensland Cabinet Minister by a fool-policeman, the persecution of ..the people under the eyes of American witnesses, the illegal arrests, the brutal treatment of political prisoners are all combining for the same final good. In a coming hour England will find herself facing internal troubles which will make enemies outside her gates undesirable. Yet, she is determined to sow the seeds of hatred not only in Ireland, but in America and in her own Colonies. How English History is Written Cardinal Newman said “To be deep,in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” It was not until he found out the fundamental falseness and prejudices of English history that he was able to shake off his traditional misconceptions of Catholicism and to regard things frankly as they are. And there can be little doubt that the prevalence of biassed views and-false notions about the Church are the greatest .obstacles to the conversion of many sincere searchers for the Truth. By the traditional lie in English . history• the Church has been misrepresented by -scores of writers, with the

result. that entirely.;. false historical views, have come -tobe accepted unquestioningly the,public. . Beginning / in the , schools where prejudiced text books, explained by prejudiced; teachers,: imbue the minds ;of j; the young . with anti-Catholic falsehoods, : continued,. in ~ the r press which is controlled by,, men who have assimilated the wrong, opinions, and in j a literature -.which a is often openly hostile to . our doctrines, , the traditional blindness is sustained and strengthened as a - great bulwark against Rome. , , The lies in the press and in works r of fiction act insidiously ; the lies of historians . are more directly injurious, especially if . the historians have - a vogue which they by no means merit as is ; too- often the case in England, where true historians are few and far to seek. . The Histories of England .are in .the;mass misleading and harmful. No nation is so, misinformed of its past as the English. From the Reformation down to Froude the tradition that the great. Catholic Church which civilised the world and . preserved learning and culture is a human institution, more or .less corrupt, is official. Minds warped by Protestant; history cannot see in its true perspective the greatest fact in their own past. Truth, the one object of the genuine historian, is set aside at the very beginning by English writers, with the inevitable result that we have a .tradition of error and bitterness. and prejudice, owing chiefly to which English history is accounted of little moment by the scholars of Europe. Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle were all drenched in prejudices, and the history they wrote was anything you like but scientific. Lingard set the example of how history ought to be written, Gasquet, following in his footsteps, refuted many of the old lies and myths; but these men are not popularly read and the lie still holds the masses. Our encyclopedias are full of misstatements as to the Catholic position. The partisan and the enemy of the Church have the ear of the man-in-the-street as well as of the schoolmaster. In a well-known encyclopedia the article on the Papacy was written by an apostate priest.. The chapters on the early Church in the Cambridge Modern. History are by writers who were entirely prejudiced. The public are offered views about ,us by men who have accepted the traditional lies, and it is small 'wonder that the public should be deceived. Of late years Catholic writers have begun to combat the falsehoods. Gasquet, , Lingard, Hilaire Belloc, Newman, and- Ward have mercilessly exposed falsehoods that have been unquestioningly.- accepted by so-called scholars. But Catholics have not the public ear, and so strong is the tradition that people will refuse to accept Catholic witnesses when they testify against , old views that have become part and parcel of the Protestant tradition. Indeed, ; they are to a great extent part of Protestantism ; for in the ! Low Churches it is questionable if a congregation would tolerate a minister who would dare tell the truth about the Catholic Church. To .a few non-Catholics we owe a very big debt of gratitude. Cob belt’s merciless exposure of the falsehoods about the Reformation. G. K. Chesterton has recently published a popular essay to show how wrong are the received views of English historians. Dr. James Gairdner’s LoUardy grid the Reformation is another recent study ; which ' shows how religious prejudices warped the truth and how the '.real nature of the Reformation was sedulously concealed! How the Orangemen Succeeded the Snakes ,In Ireland _ £ The Irish fought and died for the Stuarts, as they have always done for lost causes.,,-; And when - King James came to the English Throne it was .not, in those far-off days ere the long lesson of British perfidy and dishonor had been thoroughly learned, unreasonable that the Irish should hope; for fair play under a Stuart king. But with all our traditional attachment to the Stuarts, and in spite of all the romance of history,nt must be said that they were,, never reliable -friends.,= 'So James proved a broken reed for the Irish as soon: as he saw that it was not good policy .to be honest and true. Recognising; that if he made- any concessions oto Ireland he would incur... the hostility of i his English

friends, and 5 not * man enough 'to ! play a man’s ‘ part)" he ; began his reign by a proclamation to ‘ the effect that “liberty of Conscience he 'could not grant” to the Cath- ’ olics of ' "Ireland. 1, He assured them f that the *:sword should sheathed and that they should be ruled by English laws. And they r: were! They ' ■ soon learned that ? the ' naked sword' is preferable to the pen of ‘ a plotter when r ’ the latter is used to ; frame Acts of Parliament devised for purposes of wholesale robbery. The chivalrous English were now told that they must forego their morning sport of murdering the Irish. In their favor instead ‘‘beneficial’’ measures were designed with the usual foresight for her own interests and the usual ■disregard for common morality displayed by England in all her dealings with Ireland. Lord Bacon, who was a hi an of ' ideas, suggested one to the king. It was to /effect that a settlement of English husbandmen in If eland would safeguard the interests of the Crown. Here was the germ from which the “Garrison” sprung. The question was where to plant the tools. O’Neill and Tyrconnel were dangerous men, but a pretext must be found for deliberately plundering them. A convenient letter (such as Lloyd George is skilled at in- • spiring to-day) was found near Dublin Castle. This document contained hints of a plot of the usual type that is made in England for Irishmen. The letter was certainly forged, but the excuse was good enough. O’Neill and Tyremind were proclaimed traitors and had to flee to the Continent. The king then appealed to the City of London to take up the lands of the Irish. He told the aldermen that the soil was rich and well watered; that fuel was abundant, and that there was promise of a fine opening for commerce. Six Ulster counties were confiscated (which is the remote reason why ' Orangemen still think they own six counties in Ireland). The plains and valleys of Fermanagh, Armagh, and Down passed from the hands of their lawful owners into those of the “scum of England and Scotland” fleeing from Justice. As that peculiarly English historian, Froude, tells us, the planters got whatever land was worth getting, and the native Irish got the barren mountains and the bogs. To prevent the rightful owners from getting back their own by lawful means it was enacted that no planter should alienate his portion “to the mere Irish.” In this manner the infamous plantation of Ulster was engineered. Naturally, the Irish were not pleased, and even from longsuffering people it was too much to expect that they should not occasionally trouble the “scum of England and Scotland” whom a paternal English Government had obligingly placed in possession of their property without consulting the wishes of the rightful owners. They spoiled the spoilers not infrequently and not gently, remembering that rtf The fertile plain, the softened vale * • Were. once the birthright of the gale. ~ . True, there was an Irish Parliament at the time,, and its consent was requisite as a mere formality for this royal act of robbery. Once more a. high-souled-English Minister of the Lloyd George type came to the king’s aid and suggested that there was a . way to overcome the opposition of the Irish Parliament. It was not an honest way, but that did not matter to a dishonest king and to his protegees. Honesty was not a word in their vocabulary. It is absent from English morality even still. Forty boroughs were created in a single day, “consisting for the most part of townships that had: not yet been built.” These boroughs were authorised to elect two members each, and when Parliament met, two hundred thousand English and Anglo-Irish Protestants were found to have •' : more * representatives than six times their number of Irish Catholics. 0 We have had something like that in very recent times as a result: of the friendship of Lloyd George for the German? agent, ; Sit Edward Carson. To make matters still easier the representatives of the new boroughs were chosen from the Lord Deputy’s servants, attorneys’ clerks, bankrupts, 'outlaws, arid" other ■■ persons .' in a properly servile condition: r! And when ; the old. representatives complained of this swindle the kipg’s answer

was: “Too many members ? The more the merrier.” In a way that has become a tradition in English dealings with Ireland, the name and- -the appearance of freedom was granted to the Irish but the substance was taken away.. When, further, it was pointed out ; that many of the 1 mercenary 1 tools thus chosen were 5 unlawfully elected, being criminals ; ; and worse, the answer was that it would greatly prejudice public business to have a delay caused by an inquiry just then. And the bankrupt/ the outlawed/ the criminals declared ' that the Idnds of which ' ’Neill and Tyrconnel were robbed were duly forfeit to the Crown' and in no way belonging to the mere Irish. James, acting again on the shrewd advice of his ; noble advisers/ went another step. va * He paternally assumed unto himself the right of looking after the children of Catholic landholders. He had them educated in the “reformed religion.” If they Were girls he supplied them with Protestant husbands. And in time this policy gave him a little gang of renegades whom England found very useful in all her dishonest trafficking from that day to this. An O’Brien became Earl of Thonioud, an O’Healy, Earl of Dorioghmore, an O’Quin, Earl of Dunraven, and a new coterie of anti-Irish courtiers were ready to take their place at the Court and to fawn on the reigning monarch. “The chief, who lived among his people,” says Gavan Duffy, “and who was a visible Providence, began' to be replaced by an English cavalier who spent the revenues of the O’Brien’s country, or the McWilliam’s country, in playing hazard with Buckingham, or junketting with the accommodating ladies of Whitehall.” What James began was carried on by Charles. Of the robbery under that Stuart king we may speak another day. Enough now to say that it was part and parcel of the general policy that has endured up to our own time. We have written sufficient here to show on what a title is based the claims of the noisy savages of Ulster who were going to kick the king’s Crown into the Boyne a few years ago. The origin of the Orangemen’s selfishness and want of patriotism is clear. They are to this day strangers in Ireland, holding by might the lands of the native people; They have not a shadow of right to speak as Irishmen. The only reparation that an honest British Government—if such could ever be—could make to Ireland is to drive them forth body and bones and send them back to the countries from which'their criminal and outlawed fathers first came. An Orangeman in Ireland is simply the wrongful holder of stolen goods. He has no standing in law or justice. Prussianism is his title and Hunnishness marks all his ways. St. Patrick, we are told by an old legend, banished snakes and serpents from Erin. The Stuart kings introduced a breed that is tenfold worse. And one day the vipers turned and stung their royal patrons. They are always ready to do that. We saw it in-the machinations - of Carson with the Kaiser and in the speeches-of the Ulster parsons four years ago". Dis loyalty to" all but their own selfish interests, immorality of the kind that Belloc tells us drove the Wexford peasants to rebellion, bigotry and -savagery of a type unknown among Zulus and Sioux savages, cowardice which made a general say that his Orange soldiers were a menace to all except the enemy, have been the splendid traits of the men for whom Lloyd George sold his soul. Y